Tag: Trump impeachment inquiry

Impeachment Support Grows, but So Does the Public Divide

New York Times logoAmericans are as divided over impeachment as they are over President Trump. But support for the Democrats’ inquiry is building even in places Mr. Trump won, and among politically crucial independents.

CULPEPER, Va. — Over lunch at the Frost Cafe, a corner diner in a picturesque pocket of Virginia that President Trump won handily in 2016, opinion over his impeachment is as varied as anywhere in the country.

Garland Gentry, 74, a pro-Trump retiree, declared the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry “another in a long line of hoaxes,” while Cindy Rafala, 59, a therapist, sat nearby and wondered, “If we don’t impeach, then what are our principles?”

Donnie Johnston, a newspaper columnist who voted for Mr. Trump but has since soured on him, said Democrats are right to look into the president’s effort to pressure the leader of Ukraine to dig up dirt on political rivals. Mr. Trump, he said, makes “a wonderful tyrant but he’s a miserable president.”

View the complete October 12 article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on The New York Times website here.

Amid Show of Support, Trump Meets With Giuliani Over Lunch

New York Times logoThe president’s multiple shows of support for his personal lawyer on Saturday seemed meant to tamp down questions about Mr. Giuliani’s standing.

WASHINGTON — President Trump had lunch on Saturday with Rudolph W. Giuliani amid revelations that prosecutors were investigating Mr. Giuliani for possible lobbying violations, and speculation that his position as the president’s personal lawyer was in jeopardy.

The lunch, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Sterling, Va., was among several shows of the president’s support for Mr. Giuliani on Saturday. They seemed meant to tamp down questions about Mr. Giuliani’s status with a client famous for distancing himself from advisers when they encounter legal problems of their own.

Mr. Trump, during a Saturday night appearance on Fox News, called Mr. Giuliani “a great gentleman” and said he is still his lawyer. “I know nothing about him being under investigation. I can’t imagine it,” he told the host Jeanine Pirro.

View the complete October 12 article by Kenneth P. Vogel and Maggie Haberman on The New York Times website here.

Senators: If you read that article Trump sent you, you should read this, too

Washington Post logoPresident Trump likes to use his Twitter account to promote news articles, cable-news segments and opinion pieces that bolster his political rhetoric. Trump uses Twitter the way college students use telephone poles: a forum for quickly assembled, often questionably useful messages.

Sometimes, though, Twitter isn’t enough for Trump. It wasn’t on Friday, when Trump came across a column by the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel that he deemed so urgent that he had his staff send it to every senator on Capitol Hill.

It’s not surprising that Trump would embrace a column by Strassel, an opinion columnist whose views of investigations into the president overlap with Trump’s so neatly that it’s as though they came from the same mold. Trump has tweeted about Strassel or retweeted her more than 20 times, usually because she’s raising an eyebrow at new reporting about Trump’s behavior. After the report by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III came out in April, Trump suggested that Strassel get the Pulitzer Prize.

View the complete October 11 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Impeachment has put Trump in a different place. He’s showing it every day.

Washington Post logoPresident Trump delivered a characteristic performance Thursday night in Minneapolis. His 100-minute rally speech was complete with scattered vulgarities, caustic attacks on political opponents, including former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and an accusation that Democrats who have begun an impeachment inquiry are carrying out “a brazen attempt to overthrow our government.”

For the president it was all in a day’s work. And ever since the first stories broke three weeks ago about Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to help find damaging information about the Bidens and about Hillary Clinton, there has been some version of the Minnesota performance virtually every day.

Many Americans have become inured to the president’s volatile behavior. Yet even by the standards of this presidency, Trump has been operating beyond his often-untethered bounds. His Twitter feed has been more frantic, his public comments angrier and more abusive, his sense of victimhood more visible than ever. Including his attacks on the investigation by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, there may be no period in the entirety of Trump’s presidency comparable to the behavior now on display.

View the complete October 12 article by Dan Balz on The Washington Post website here.

McConnell tightlipped as impeachment furor grows

The Hill logoSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is keeping a low profile amid the growing impeachment battle surrounding the White House over President Trump’s political dealings with foreign governments.

McConnell made news in the first days of the two-week congressional recess, when he said he would have “no choice” but to move impeachment if the House sends over articles.

Since then, however, he’s largely gone quiet, turning his attention to issues like opioid funding, getting money for Fort Campbell and judicial nominations.

View the complete October 12 article by Jordain Carney on The Hill website here.

Cracks emerge in White House strategy as witness testifies

The Hill logoCracks are starting to emerge in the White House’s overarching strategy not to cooperate with any aspect of House Democrats’ impeachment investigation and other probes.

In the course of a few hours Friday, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch appeared on Capitol Hill to testify, defying the White House’s order that she skip the closed-door deposition. Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to the European Union, indicated he will testify on Thursday, after the State Department blocked his appearance this week.

And a federal appeals court ruled Friday in favor of Democrats seeking Trump’s tax returns and other financial records — documents the president has refused to turn over.

View the complete October 11 article by Scott Wong and Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Trump obfuscates, misleads and exaggerates to make his case against impeachment

Washington Post logoPresident Trump’s propensity to mislead, misconstrue and obfuscate is escalating as he confronts the threat of becoming just the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.

For days, Trump and his allies have repeatedly charged that the whistleblower — whose complaint about Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine set off the current impeachment inquiry — made up a “false story,” even though many of the claims have been shown to be accurate. The president has insisted that his top Democratic and Republican critics on Capitol Hill should be impeached for their efforts against him, despite a centuries-old precedent that prevents such an action.

And White House lawyers this week sent congressional leaders an eight-page letter, vowing not to cooperate with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, that was laden with imprecise or misleading interpretations of congressional oversight powers and the chamber’s constitutional right to impeach, according to legal experts.

View the complete October 11 article by Seung Min Kim on The Washington Post website here.

The Looming Constitutional Crisis

An impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump is pushing the country closer than it has been in years to a constitutional crisis.

Beyond the politics and partisanship of the moment, President Donald Trump and majority Democrats in the House of Representatives are colliding in the most extraordinary test of the Constitution’s separation of powers in many years.

“We are heading rapidly towards a constitutional crisis,” David Rothkopf, a political scientist and specialist in international relations, told MSNBC. This is because Trump doesn’t accept the legitimacy of Congress’s bid to impeach him as sought by House Democrats, and the House under those Democrats won’t back away from efforts to punish him for what critics call abuses of power.

“It’s headed, I think, for the Supreme Court,” says Rutgers University political scientist Ross Baker.

View the complete October 11 article by Kenneth T. Walsh on The U.S. News and World Report website here.

Home MailNewsFinanceSportsEntertainmentSearchMobileMore Yahoo Search Skip to Navigation Skip to Main Content Skip to Related Content Sign in Mail ‘Trey is a joke among us’: Gowdy is a divisive addition to Trump’s legal team

WASHINGTON — The president’s decision to bulk up his legal team with former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy amid a widening impeachment inquiry is drawing criticism from one of his high-profile supporters.

On Wednesday morning, the day after news leaked that Gowdy was set to serve as outside counsel to the president, Victoria Toensing, a veteran Washington lawyer who has been working with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, expressed concern and disbelief that the onetime advocate for congressional oversight would be coming onboard.

“Trey Gowdy doesn’t know s***,” she said.

View the complete October 10 article by Hunter Walker on the Yahoo News website here.

Trump’s Sweeping Case Against Impeachment Is a Political Strategy

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — Breathtaking in scope, defiant in tone, the White House’s refusal to cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry amounts to an unabashed challenge to America’s longstanding constitutional order.

In effect, President Trump is making the sweeping assertion that he can ignore Congress as it weighs his fate because he considers the impeachment effort unfair and the Democrats who initiated it biased against him, an argument that channeled his anger even as it failed to pass muster with many scholars on Wednesday.

But the White House case, outlined in an extraordinary letter to Democratic leaders on Tuesday, is more a political argument than a legal one, aimed less at convincing a judge than convincing the public, or at least a portion of it. At its core, it is born out of the cold calculation that Mr. Trump probably cannot stop the Democrat-led House from impeaching him, so the real goal is to delegitimize the process.

View the complete October 9 article by Peter Baker on The New York Times website here.